Last year, JPMorgan Chase & Co. tapped Matt Beardall as its first-ever Greater Washington market president for middle-market commercial banking, catering to companies with $20 million to $500 million in revenue. He was charged with building out a local team and introducing the bank to area businesses. Fourteen months later, the New York-based banking giant has outgrown its Tysons Corner office.

Beardall talks about the company’s expansion plans in the region.

I hear you’re looking for a bigger office? We’re running out of space, and we’re looking to about double the size. We’re in about 2,700 square feet and going to about 5,000. We’re looking at some different spaces in Tysons Corner now, and hope to move in the next six to nine months.

Have you added a lot of people? We’ve been trying to build out the local credit team, which we see as essential. In addition to Michael Landini, who came from Bank of America last year to lead our local credit team, we’ve added Morgan Spreng from SunTrust and Will Horstman from Bank of America over the past six months. Now we’ve got three dedicated credit resources here with strong government contracting backgrounds. We’ve also added Alison Werner on the nonprofit side.

What about on the sales side? We brought on Erika Capobianco, who joined us from SunTrust as a banker. She’s finding new business and maintaining our relationships. We’re hiring for a senior banker too.

You’re expanding to Baltimore too? Yes. We really want to find a good seasoned Baltimore banker to staff a commercial office there. It will be co-located with a new private banking office, which will have two to three bankers. We hope to open there in the fall.

What industries in Baltimore will you go after? A lot of our interest there stems from the expansion of the port in Baltimore, which will now be one of the only ports on the East Coast that can take [mid-sized cargo] ships. Being such a large international bank, we’re a great fit for companies that do a lot of importing and exporting. That’s one of our key strengths. There’s also a lot of redevelopment going on in Baltimore, which piques our interest from a community development perspective.

You help a lot of companies finance acquisitions. Where are you seeing the most activity these days? We’ve been very busy in and around Baltimore, Richmond and Roanoke. I’d say in D.C., we’re looking at a lot. But I think most of what was going to get done got done in the last quarter of last year. It’s been more quiet in the government contracting space. That said, we’re talking to a lot of government contractors about making acquisitions. They’re looking at acquisition lines, they want to know about debt capacity and what they could borrow if and when they find the right target. But up to this point, it’s just been conversations.

What is driving your lending volume now? We’re seeing a nice resurgence in “traditional economy” companies, like manufacturing, wholesale distributors and importer-exporters that really haven’t borrowed money for years.